From a smartphone platform that helps Thai migrant workers file complaints in their native language to helping businesses understand the nuances of local dialects, Southeast Asia’s first artificial intelligence (AI) model is moving from the laboratory to the real world.
These applications were unveiled today at the inaugural Sea Lion Summit hosted by AI Singapore (AISG), highlighting how open source models are filling the gaps left by Western-centric AI models that often struggle with the region’s diverse language and cultural backgrounds.
Since debuting in November 2023, Sea-Lion, an acronym for Southeast Asian Languages in One Network, has gained attention across the region. To date, we have shared over 1 trillion Southeast Asian language tokens across 13 regional languages and dialects.
AISG recently partnered with Alibaba Cloud on Qwen-Sea-Lion-v4, a version of the model built on the Chinese hyperscaler’s Qwen3-32B base model. This can be run on a consumer-grade laptop with 32 GB of RAM. This is an important feature for the region, where many small businesses and developers do not have access to industrial-grade graphics processing unit clusters.
To ensure that Sea Lions, which now supports multimodal input, continues to reflect local voices, culture, and needs, AISG also developed the Aquarium open data platform in collaboration with Google. This will enable users including researchers, developers, policy makers, and grassroots organizations to contribute to, view, and collaborate on language datasets across the region.
solve real world problems
The summit highlighted how organizations are deploying sea lions to address societal issues. For example, UN Women is using this model for its Talking Justice initiative, which aims to support migrant workers in Thailand by providing a multilingual, AI-assisted grievance platform.
Kate Sumner, senior consultant for digital public goods for gender justice at UN Women, said: “Workers will now be able to submit complaints safely, privately and in their own language, directly by phone or community centre.”
Sumner added that the system will integrate automatic translation and conversational guidance, and will eliminate “significant friction points” in the current system by connecting workers with legal and psychosocial services.
On the commercial side, companies like NCS and Good Bards are using this model to build scalable multilingual AI platforms and services for their clients.
Alan Ho, CEO and co-founder of Good Bards, said integrating Sea-Lion into the company’s marketing operating system will give clients a distinct advantage when engaging with the Southeast Asia region through a more localized lens.
“The importance of local context in customer engagement cannot be overstated, and Good Bards makes it easy for customers to leverage Sea-Lion’s capabilities to effectively engage their audiences,” he added.
To foster innovation in the region, AISG also held the Pan-Southeast Asian AI Developer Challenge, which concluded with a summit. With support from leading technology companies such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Nvidia, the challenge attracted nearly 800 participants from 235 teams.
Winning solutions included tools to improve financial literacy in unbanked communities and health advisories in multiple dialects to bridge language gaps across the region.
Lesley Teo, senior director of AI products at AISG, said the innovations demonstrated in this challenge are proof of what a dedicated community can achieve with the support of a locally focused and open foundation.
“We hope this summit will inspire developers, researchers, and businesses to build and deploy impactful next-generation AI solutions that address Southeast Asia’s many challenges and opportunities,” he said.
